Preliminary Examination
Britain/Empire/Commonwealth, 1688-present
Spring 2009
Answer one question from each section. You must do a total of three (3)
questions. Be sure each essay has a clear line of argument, addresses as many
dimensions of the question as possible, and offers relevant, persuasive evidence from
specific secondary sources wherever appropriate. Good luck!
Section I
A. To what extent was the changing architecture of the British state and its definition of
citizen and subject constitutive of empire? What relationship has the empire had to the
major constitutional debates of the 18th-20th centuries? In your answer discuss the
different motors of imperial expansion and their relationship to the state. What is the
relationship between cultural history and the realm of high politics?
B. Salman Rushdie is famous for his observation that most of English history happened
overseas so the English don’t know what it means. Yet William Gladstone also remarked
that “the sentiment of empire is innate in every Briton.” How would you construct an
undergraduate sylabus on Victorian Britain that operates from these premises, captures
the “chaotic pluralism” of empire and remaps the fact of global empire(s) onto the
“domestic” narrative without re-inscribing the kind of English exceptionalism on view in
both Victorian and postcolonial readings of imperial culture?
Section II
A. Categories of difference have received much attention from scholars in the past twenty
years. Outline the vocabulary of difference in the historiography you have studied. What
are the primary markers of difference, domestically and imperially? How do they
intertwine, impact, reinforce and destabilize each other?
B. Phenomena like the local and space/place are, arguably, questions of scale and
positionality that require specific kinds of research design and equally purposeful
methodological procedures. How does one map the scalar complexity of imperial power
in ways that are attentive to indigeneity, contiguity, and those reterritorializations that
calcify as they undo (and vice versa, of course). What, in other words, is transnational
method in imperial history, and/or what should it be?
Section III
A. How can space be used as a category of analysis for British and imperial history?
What kinds of geographies are made visible with this approach? How does an attention to
inter- and intra- imperial, as well as indigenous geographies and traffics shape our
understandings? To what extent are geographies and concepts of space used in different
places and spaces to forward or counter imperialism?
B. “Imperial” history and “native” history have typically been drawn from different
archives and have as typically been addressed to different audiences. Is it possible to
reconcile the two -- as research projects, as narrative forms and as intellectual/political
interventions in contemporary questions? What are the limits of imperial history? When,
where and under what circumstances does it have purchase, efficacy and persuasive
power, and for whom? And why history as opposed to, say, anthropology?